DON’T BE SO AN­NOY­ING!

Alot of cin­ema eti­quette comes down to com­mon sense. Don’t talk – it’ll an­noy peo­ple who paid to hear the film, not you.

Don’t play on your phone – it’ll an­noy peo­ple try­ing to con­cen­trate on the big screen, not your small screen. Don’t kick the chair in front of you – what kind of oik are you?

These are all rules that the reg­u­lar, func­tional, grown adult should have no trou­ble get­ting their head around. But there are peo­ple who need more pre­cise cin­ema rules be­cause, for some rea­son, com­mon sense goes out of the win­dow once they’re in a dark­ened room.

For ex­am­ple, most of us wouldn’t need to be told “don’t try to open a beer us­ing a can of pep­per spray”.

But there’s a guy in Ger­many who does. Or at least, did, be­cause I doubt he’s go­ing to make the same mis­take again.

A cin­ema in the Ger­man town of Osnabrück was evac­u­ated af­ter a man tried to open a beer with “per­sonal pro­tec­tion” pep­per spray. The spray can broke in the process, which ef­fec­tively turned it into a tear gas bomb, and 200 pan­icked film­go­ers were forced to flee the cin­ema. Amaz­ingly, no­body ex­pe­ri­enced prob­lems with their breath­ing or vi­sion and de­spite the po­lice ar­riv­ing, no­body was ar­rested. The film restarted 30 min­utes later, which speaks to Ger­man sto­icism. I can’t imag­ine a UK cin­ema in 2017 em­brac­ing the “show must go on” con­cept so whole-heart­edly.

So, just to be ab­so­lutely clear, tak­ing pep­per spray into a cin­ema screen­ing and then try­ing to open a beer us­ing the pres­surised can of toxic gas, is a bad idea. Don’t do that.

Keep to the rules in the cin­ema and we’ll all en­joy watch­ing the film

Har­ri­son Ford as Han Solo in Stars Wars

Hans Solo at the end of The Em­pire Strikes Back and, be­low, Har­ri­son Ford with his co-stars Mark Hamill and Car­rie Fisher